Credits
What a credit is, what spends it, and where to see the balance.
Everything on Odel runs on credits, and they belong to an organization rather than to you personally — even your own personal organization has its own balance, separate from any team you're a member of.
What credits are
One credit is worth $1.00. Odel tracks it in millionths internally so a per-call price can be a fraction of a cent, but everywhere you see a number it's in credits.
You buy credits in whole numbers, 10 to 10,000 at a time, through Stripe Checkout from the
Billing page under Account → Organization → Billing (/account/billing). No subscription is
required to buy credits or to spend them.
What spends them
A credit is spent by a call to a priced gateway or a priced hosted module. The price is per call and set by its owner — the owner, and every member of the organization that owns it, call it for free. The price is what everyone else pays.
Not every call that reaches one is charged for it:
- A call that fails at the transport layer, at sign-in, or inside Odel's own routing before it reaches the server is never charged.
- A call the server actually answers is charged, even when the answer is the tool reporting its own error. Odel charges for a served response, not a successful one.
No overdraft
A call is refused before it reaches the server when your organization can't cover the price out of the credits it can spend on that module. The error names the price, what your organization can spend on that module, and where to top up. Nothing is spent on a refused call.
Where credits come from and how they're used up
A purchase creates a bucket: a chunk of credits with its own source, its own expiry if it has one, and its own remaining balance as it's spent. When an organization has more than one bucket, they're drawn down in a fixed order, so a call always empties the same bucket first rather than taking a little from each.
A bucket comes from a purchase, or from a lease: credits an organization you belong to has granted your personal organization, drawn from that organization's own balance and spent before your own. A lease can be limited to modules the organization names, and credits limited that way pay for nothing else. The model has room for a subscription grant and a promotional grant as well, but neither exists yet — nothing mints one. The Billing page lists your organization's active buckets: what each is for, how much is left of it, and when, if ever, it expires.
Where to see it
The Billing page (/account/billing) is where an organization's owner manages all of this: the
current balance, the buckets behind it, every credit purchase, and what the organization spent
over the last 30 days. A purchase that never finished — the Checkout tab was closed before
paying, say — stays listed as pending and can be completed from the same row.
Your dashboard shows a narrower slice of the same thing: your personal organization's balance and what it has spent over the last 30 days, with a shortcut to top up.